GOVERNMENT TO GIVE JOBLESS£400 TO FIND WORK

About 250,000 unemployed people are to be offered handouts of up to£400 by the government in an attempt to lure th...

About 250,000 unemployed people are to be offered handouts of up to£400 by the government in an attempt to lure them back into work, according to The Independent (p1).

Gordon Brown, the chancellor, is expected to unveil the 'employment grants' in his Budget in three weeks time, as a key element in a range of measures to boost enterprise and jobs.

People who have been out of work for more than 12 months will qualify for lump-sum payments of£300 to£400 to ease their transition back into the labour market. The grants will help them meet living costs as they await their first pay packets after losing social security benefits and to maintain their housing benefit payments for two to four weeks.

The chancellor will say today: 'Our programme is about getting unemployed people into businesses not into benefit offices. It is not about dependence, it is about dynamism. It is not about subsidies, it is about success. It is a get up an go approach, not a giro approach.'

Other measures expected in the Budget include a network of call centres where staff will phone jobless people when vacancies arise. There will also be new 'employment zones' in which companies will be allowed to give work trials to people on the dole. Enterprise grants will be available to help the unemployed start their own firms.

“The resilience, it gets into you.” This is how Robin Tuddenham describes the influence of his early career, which involved periods working with life sentence offenders and families at risk of seeing their children go into care, on his current work as Calderdale MBC’s chief executive.

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